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Investing in young talents has so many parallels with investing in young startups. Getting in at the “pre-seed’ round of these talents allows me to be at the beginning of highest-growth talents who go on to have incredible high-powered careers, both in and outside of tech.

Romulus Capital Venture Fellowship is a semester-long fellowship where we identify some of the brightest, hustling young talents who may never heard of venture capital before and teach them how to break into the craft of investing through both seminar-like group sessions and experiential learning.

With 4 years’ experience of running the program and with 100+ alumni, we have learned to limit the cohort to 6–8 spots so that each fellow receives ample opportunities to experience firsthand apprenticeship learning, find a personal mentorship at the partnership and the associate level, and develop meaningful relationships among the cohort-mates. In exchange, we get the unique opportunity to witness firsthand each fellows’ learning rate and their standards of excellence over a meaningful amount of time.

With over 100–150 applicants every semester, I’m really proud to announce our eight fellows for the RCVF 21F Cohort:

Valentina Costarelli

Valentina is at the California Institute of Technology where she is majoring in Computer Science with a concentration in Physics. Born in Italy, she moved to southern California with her family at the age of 12. She is fascinated by the world of science, tech, and finance. Valentina recently worked as a software development engineer at Amazon within the AWS Artificial Intelligence division. Before that, she was an observational cosmology intern researching the mysteries of the early universe. She has also shadowed ophthalmologic procedures and intraocular lens replacement surgeries. Valentina is passionate about STEM advocacy and education and has been a part of international conferences as a guest speaker and other STEM events. Outside of work and her studies, Valentina loves art, reading, and walks along the beach.

Mirella Deng

Mirella is at McGill University, studying investment management. Born and raised in Ottawa, she grew up swimming competitively and avidly researching proteins before entering the busy world of finance. She recently completed a summer in investment banking at TD Securities with the TMT Toronto team where she was immersed in the healthcare IT space and introduced to venture capital and growth equity. Through the Romulus Capital Venture Fellowship, she is excited to dive deeper into the entrepreneurial and tech side of business and realize synergies with her finance background. Outside of class, Mirella enjoys getting back in the pool, listening to Khalid, and dreaming about her future tiny house build.

Ivan Dewerpe

Ivan is a global citizen, having lived in seven countries across four continents, and is a first-year graduate student at Columbia University in Computer Science. He is a founding member of Monolog, an audio journaling company augmented by Natural Language Processing, enabling users to analyze the aspects of their lives that impact their Happiness, Stress, Anxiety and Focus levels. He is most passionate about Artificial Intelligence, especially Reinforcement Learning, AI Safety and explainability. One of his long-term goals is to build trust between humans and technology by ensuring the development of human-interpretable AI systems to allow for oversight of potential machine flaws. Outside of Romulus, Ivan is an avid fan of Fnatic’s League of Legends team, loves playing tennis and squash with friends, and learning Mandarin.

Katherine He

Katherine is at MIT double majoring in computer science and business management. She’s passionate about all areas of entrepreneurship and especially interested in innovative technological solutions that will fundamentally disrupt existing sectors. Previously, she interned at Two Sigma during summer 2021, where she worked on infrastructure for treasury and payments, and at the startup AccesSOS during spring 2021 where she worked on the UI and functionalities of their application. On campus, she’s the director of HackMIT, a student-run organization that operates MIT’s largest undergraduate hackathon with over 1,000 annual participants and significant corporate sponsorships. She is also involved in MIT’s student government and TedxMIT. Outside of MIT and the business world, Katherine enjoys listening, playing, and writing music, as well as traveling to new cities and exploring their museums.

Mariam Kamerji

Mariam is at Columbia University where she hopes to major in sustainable development and business as she has a passion for creating sustainable change in the world. Mariam has a passion for startups as she is heavily immersed in the Columbia Startup ecosystem. She has been product manager for a total of three startups (Sonar, Pawful, and Opal) through the Columbia Build Lab, where she created product strategies, managed people, and lead discussions and initiatives to move things forward for each respective startup. She was also an Almaworks Fellow and learned impact organizational strategy, product development, and go-to-market strategy. Currently she is also working on a startup of her own called Throworg that works to drastically decrease greenhouse gas emissions that are a result of the waste sector. Outside of the startup world, Mariam likes to go to arcade games and try to win the prizes-aka the fluffy stuffed animals.

Priyanka Kumar

Priyanka is at Harvard University majoring in Economics with a secondary in Computer Science. She is the Vice President of Harvard Undergraduate Capital Partners and started the HUCP Innovation Fund to support early-stage entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds by providing equity-free grants of up to $10K and thousands of dollars in partnership credits to any Harvard-affiliated founder. Priyanka is very passionate about robotics and spent two summers at General Electric’s Research and Development Robotics Group creating crawler robots and drones for the inspection and maintenance industry in aviation and energy sectors. Outside of robotics, Priyanka cares a lot about creating better access to education for individuals from all backgrounds and has been recently exploring and working with startups in the edtech space. In her free time, Priyanka likes to hang out on Clubhouse, listen to podcasts like Ted Radio Hour and The Daily, or sing opera.

Jay Qu

Jay is a fifth year PhD Candidate in Physics at Stanford, researching at SLAC National Lab in the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences. He is most passionate about the Energy, Climate Tech, and Real Estate spaces, and how new research and technologies can drive impactful hardware, software, and business model innovations. His interest in entrepreneurship started in late 2019 when he co-founded a startup with friends from college called Terra2, which aimed to democratize solar investing via an online platform that would allow everyday investors to invest directly in solar projects via “solar REITs,” and led this team through the 2020 Cleantech Open accelerator. He is also passionate about the way in which we can leverage this new age of interconnectedness to build technology-enabled online platforms and communities to connect us with other people with shared interests and ideals. To that end, he is working on an idea through Stanford’s Cardinal Ventures accelerator and the GSB’s Startup Garage that aims to enable emerging music artists to more directly engage with their supporters and build a fan community via blockchain technology. Jay loves going to music performances, hiking, traveling, and meeting people from all walks of life.

RunLin Wang

RunLin is at Harvard University studying Statistics and Computer Science. Originally from Calgary, Canada, he spent most of his time before college studying biology and chemistry, before coming to college and being captivated by the dynamic interface between technological innovation and the business world. Over the past few years, he’s worked with a variety of small startups in areas ranging from health software to edtech. RunLin particularly enjoys the thought process behind analyzing how small startup ideas can scale and make large-scale impacts in a sector. He also likes to focus on new technologies in technical industries, such as telecommunications and semiconductors. In his free time, he can be found skiing, playing tennis, and riding electric scooters.

If you’d like to apply for the next cohort, just sign up for our notification emailing list.

Best way for 1-on-1 convo, pitches, questions — Twitter @JoeyJinKim.

Venture capital has become sexy. Your job is to hear pitches from the most passionate entrepreneurs working on the coolest ideas and give them money. It certainly is the best job I’ve ever had. But it can be seen as an exclusive Ivy-educated old boys’ club or something only attainable after a lifetime as a successful executive or a founder.

But here’s the truth about breaking into venture capital in the 2020s.

You don’t need a prestigious degree. Hell, you don’t need any degree.

You don’t need to have the right “work experience” in corporate America or as a founder.

You don’t even need to be the smartest person in the room either.

All you need is to want it. Badly. This is not some inspirational Instagram post. I mean it.

All you need is the desire — supported by hustle and resourcefulness.

This is the only prerequisite for anyone, of any educational background, of any work experience, and of any age, to reliably break into venture capital.

Method 1: Just Start Doing the Job that You Want.

Here’s the most surprising secret I’ve learned about breaking into venture capital: You don’t need permission from anyone to do the job of a venture capital associate, which is primarily sourcing and due diligence (i.e. finding and vetting interesting startups ).

Just go do it. Stop talking or dreaming or asking about doing it. Just do it. If you want this job, go talk to startups that you find interesting as a free agent on your free time after work or classes, and a venture capital firm will eventually pick you up as a member of their team. Here’s literally a step-by-step guide on how to do this:

1. Reach out warm or cold to 10–20 early-stage startup CEOs in a chosen focus (e.g., geography, school campus, industry).
2. You tell them the genuine reason why you find them interesting + your original perspective on the chosen focus (i.e., “Payer distribution in healthcare rather than product is the secret to winning.”) + you ask to chat with them to discuss ideas for 15–20 minutes. All within 5–7 sentences.
3. In the conversation, build rapport + ask them about their financing needs. Tell them, “If I were to connect you to VCs, would you be interested in the intro?” 99% of the time, founders will jump at the opportunity.
4. After the conversation, take a step back. I’m sure you really enjoyed the conversation and vibed with the founders but take a moment to objectively evaluate the companies.
5. Follow up with each startup via email and ask for a deck that you could forward to a VC.
6. Now, reach out warm or cold to 10–20 early stage VC partners in your chosen focus.
7. Tell them that you’re a student or working professional but you’ve been doing this on your free time. You’ve been talking to startups and came across a couple interesting ones. Ask for 15–20 min to discuss. VCs really appreciate this level of hustle. It’s rare.
8. Approach the conversation with humble curiosity. It’s highly likely that your evaluation of the companies will be off. It’s okay. Make sure you clearly articulate your perspective and disagree when appropriate, but then say you still have a lot to learn. Tell them you’re willing to do the legwork and you would like to learn from them on how they think about startups. Boom. You’ve just created a high probability of a genuine mentorship. Ask them if they’d be open to setting up a meeting with you every 1 or 2 months to chat about companies you’re seeing (whatever suits you and your deal velocity).
9. If VCs say they’re interested in any of the startups, connect the CEO to them via email.
10. Rinse and repeat from step 1. Now, when you meet with startups, mention the VCs that you have a relationship with.

Quick Tactical Tip: You can find almost anyone’s email using chrome extensions like Adapt Prospector, Hunter.io, RocketReach.

Congrats, you’re a VC associate. It may take 6 months to receive a formal offer. It may take a few years. It may start with a paid internship. But this works. You don’t need an Ivy pedigree. You don’t need experience. You just need your desire to do it.

I know this works because I would hire you (yes you) if you did this for the sector I’m focusing on (literally hit me up at jkim(at)romuluscap.com if you’re doing this right now).

Method 2: Join a Venture Fellowship (hint: romuluscap.com/fellowship)

Fellowships come in different forms and structures. Campus Scout Program, Venture Fellowship, VC University. Ultimately, VCs are trying to do one thing — get a sense of what it’s like to work with you before they hire you long-term.

Here’s what’s going on behind-the-scenes. Early-stage VCs are small teams, ranging from 1–8 team members. Compound that with the fact that VC is an apprenticeship game and VCs are left with the hard reality: every hire is a high-risk, high-reward, concentrated investment of time and training.

It’s a long-horizon game. Much like the early startups we invest in, hiring someone isn’t about their performance during one fixed point in time (i.e., interviews) but more about the slope of their learning trajectory (i.e., pace of learning). Fellowships are perfect vehicles for VCs to evaluate you overtime rather than during one fixed point.

But here’s the truth about these: Some are incredible learning opportunities. Others are, quite honestly, shitshows.

Here is an example of the fellowship that I’ve run for the last 3 years at Romulus Capital with 6 cohorts throughout that time. I’m really proud of it. Each iteration, we tried our best to flush out bugs while doubling-down on the best parts based on feedback from participants.

Here’s how you tell the good ones from the bad ones:

1. Who’s running it? This is a good signal of how much of a priority the program is at the firm. If it’s run by a partner-level investor who has been at the firm for a while, it signals that the firm is serious about this program. If it’s run by someone who recently joined the firm, it’s more likely an experiment (which can be okay…you just need to beware of it).
2. How much upfront communication is there? An organized program will set out clear expectations of what’s possible and what’s to be expected from both sides of the table. Time commitments, things you can expect to learn, etc. If they don’t have it…they’re making it up as they go.
3. How many people are in the program? I’ve run cohorts of 2 people. I’ve run cohorts of ~20 people. I can guarantee you that with more people in the program, what’s supposed to be a hands-on, apprenticeship-like experience is going to be diluted and wasteful of everyone’s time. Beware of “fellowships” where you have dozens of “fellows” running around without much training, guidance, or investment from the program managers. It’s a waste of your time (and in my experience, a waste of the VC’s time as well).
4. Are you learning more than they’re gaining? Fellows don’t get paid. Given that, fellowships should not feel like unpaid internships — they should feel like seminar classes & experiential learning on venture and entrepreneurship you get to take for free. Good programs should feel like you got more than you gave.
5. Are you working on real deals? Are you getting exposure to the real experience of a VC? This is what separates awesome programs from the good ones. You need to see action. You should be invited to see pitches. You should be invited to team discussions. Your work should be a part of real due diligence. You should be learning real lessons on customers, sales, and GTM so that you can apply them when you eventually start leading conversations.
6. What do past participants say about the program? This is by far the most reliable signal of the quality of the program. One caveat here is to specifically ask who ran the program when the participant was a part of it. Good program managers could be replaced with bad ones and vice versa. Your mileage gained from the experience will be night and day depending on who is spearheading the program.

The best programs will use the fellowship as a funnel into an internship or even a full-time job.

If you’re the type of person reading this article, you’re likely the type of person who’s going to give it your all when you join a Venture Fellowship. So please please choose wisely where you choose to invest your time. Join a team that will give you real exposure; that will genuinely listen to you despite the fact that you are a newcomer; that will see you not as free labor but as an investment.

Getting an internship in venture capital isn’t easy, but it is more than attainable for those who want it. None of this requires a college degree. In my experience of training over 100+ new early-stage investors, I found that the single most predictive indicator of whether they stay for more than 2 years is their hustle.

All you need is to want it. Badly. And I promise you, it’ll come to you.

P.S. Couple methods I just skipped over in this article is through the “official interview process” or through headhunters. It works but in reality, that method is pretty biased against you if you don’t happen to come from the “perfect background” of banking/consulting/founder/operator with a college degree.

Also, the methods I mentioned are mostly for early-stage investing (i.e. pre-seed to series A). VCs focused on later stages are bigger and have institutionalized recruiting processes — which translates to higher barrier to entry, oftentimes in the form of years of experience in particular fields or pedigree.

Come talk with me on @JoeyJinKim where I converse with techies, founders, investors, and everyone in between.

This study of why startups fail blew my mind. Top reason why startups fail: “No market need” which is just a nice way of saying “No one wanted to buy your useless shit”.

Of the 1,100+ startups I’ve evaluated in the past year, there were two times I was curt towards the founders. Both times, it became painfully clear during the pitch that I knew more about the nuances of their business than they did.

Disappointed, I asked them how many customers they’ve talked to. Both times, single digits. I asked to stop our conversation because we were wasting time. Sure, wasting mine but I’m just an investor — I get paid to listen.

They were wasting their time — time that they bought with sleep deprivation, depleted savings accounts, and social capital of raising a “family and friends” round. Doing a startup is costly.

So before deciding to quit your job and go “full-time entrepreneur”, talking to customer should be your part-time job.

For consumer startups, you should talk to hundreds of consumers both within and outside of your segmentation. For enterprise, a couple dozen end buyers working at your target companies.

When you buy a home without inspecting it only to discover that it’s puffing out asbestos, you’re going to feel stupid. Probably a little sick as well. Pouring your soul into a startup without the idea validation from customers will have similar side effects.

Let’s pause here for a second. As a founder, you’re thinking, ‘That’s not me. I’ve done my homework.’ As an investor, I’ve also found that most founders do their homework…yet the #1 reason for failing is still “no market need”.

Something doesn’t fit.

Here’s the likelier scenario: many founders are so enamored with their ideas that they ask leading questions during their idea validation which give them the answers they want to hear (i.e. “you’re idea is interesting!”).

As an investor, I find myself do it when I conduct due diligence calls on a company I really like. I can only imagine that founders do it even more — it is your baby. No matter how ugly it is, it’s gonna look like the cutest thing.

Look, I can’t spit out the specific list of non-leading questions that you should ask. Nor am I going to spout some non-actionable Business Insider article about “understand the pain point of the customer” and “make sure you’re solving a market need”. None of that will save you from yourself from asking leading questions.

Although I can’t provide the cure itself, what I can provide are the diagnostic tests of when you’re doing customer validation right.

You can articulate the difference between Interest vs. Intent.

In my interview with the CEOs we’ve invested in, Josh Feast, the CEO of Cogito, voicetech growth-stage startup out of MIT, had advice for first-time founders:

“One of the hardest thing for first time founders is distinguishing between interest and intent. A lot of people…want to be educated about your ideas but you can mistake that for wanting to do business with you.”

Customers who are fully ready to buy your product will say they’re “interested” in your idea.

But a little secret: so will some customers who will frankly never buy your product. “Interest” in your product is a necessary but a far-from-sufficient condition.

So here’s the test. Articulate what interest vs. intent looks like in your vertical and customer set:

• Have you talked to founders who have sold to your customer set, or better yet the individual end buyer in your customer set?
• Do you know what the specific process looks like to sell to your buyers in your vertical?
• Which actions, committees, or decisions actually signal intent to buy?

If you can’t articulate the answers, maybe you’ve only been asking questions you know the answers to.

You have a list of “intent to buy” customers.

But the truly best diagnostic test is having customers from the target market actually lining up to buy your product.

On consumer side, you can create a landing page that funnels people towards buying, ending with a credit card info page and at the very end put up “Coming Near You” page. Look at the conversion rates from landing page to buying page and benchmark it against those of similar players in your vertical (and if you don’t know those conversion rates, you’re probably not ready).

On enterprise side, LOI (Letters of Intent) allow enterprise customers to provide the necessary signal to buy without the legal binding obligations. Otherwise, if you find champions within an enterprise who’s wanting to work with you to develop the solution, that can also serve as a good substitute.

The by-products of a startup idea validation done right should be your actual first customers.

I’ve always believed that disagreeing is the best way to stress test a decision. Founding a startup is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make.

So disagree with yourself. Prove yourself wrong. Test if you actually meet these diagnostic tests of proving out if your product is actually needed or if it’ll be just another statistic in the bin of “another startup making another useless shit”.

Because I can guarantee you that if you don’t try to disprove yourself, the market will do it for you.

This post was an excerpt from my Joey Venture’s Study Group, a weekly e-mail based study group where bunch of folks and I pool together ideas, articles, and recommendations. If you wanna join, you can sign up here:

Come talk with me on @JoeyJinKim where I converse with techies, founders, investors, and everyone in between.

As an investor, I don’t create anything. I don’t provide goods or services. I sit around, talk to people smarter than me, and make decisions to invest in a given company.

Decisions. That’s my only product.

In fact, if you’re a founder, that’s eventually going to be your only product too. Founders graduate from the “builder” phase (Seed) to “manager” (Series A) to “decision-maker” (Later Stage) whether you like it or not as you graduate from idea validation and talking to customers to doubling down on growth.

But when your end product is a decision, how do you build a superior product?

Software? Add more features. Hardware? Reduce the costs of parts. In decision-making, the only real meaningful avenue to a superior product is stress-testing the robustness of your product through disagreeing.

Disagreeing exposes the points of failure in your decision-making. Your C-suite and Board should fill this role. All this is obvious. Material from corporate leadership training.

Yet, disagreeing is unnatural to most of us. I know it wasn’t to me and still isn’t.

In social settings, disagreements mean stilted conversations and difficult dinner guests. In school, we match our answer to the answer in the back of the book, not challenge it. In MBA programs, we’re taught the “yes, and-” mentality where you first agree with the other person before building your own agenda on top of it.

But if you’re an entrepreneur at the executive level or an investor, you need to put a stop to this mentality right now. You are responsible for your product. If you’re a C-suite, your product in your company is decision-making. And simply agreeing with your C-suite suite or Board Members is leading to a weaker product.

If you’re like me and have been conditioned to “agree first, think later” in almost every social situation so far in life, there are systematic changes you and I should implement:

1. Stop operating on an opt-out implicit approval model.

Implicit approval includes small acts like nodding, putting in fillers like “definitely” or “mhmm” in conversations, and implicitly agreeing through silence. The problem with implicit approval is that they become habits. Start nodding at the beginning of sentence and you’ll find that you’re still nodding by the end of it.

The worst version of implicit approval is the opt-out version. Stop handing out your agreement with an idea so freely. It cheapens the value of your approval. It exposes you as a lazy listener who is not critically analyzing what’s being said.

Agreeing with an idea is not something to be opted out of — only something that we opt into. We should only agree if we mean to agree.

This systematically raises the level of discipline and quality of our decisions.

2. Lead sentences with matter-of-fact disagreements.

Begin with “I actually don’t agree with your analysis.”

Follow up with the reason. “The data doesn’t support it.” Or “The case example of X doesn’t support it.”

No emotionally charged words. Just factual, unapologetic agree or disagree.

I find that the sentence of explicit disagreements are the toughest to spit out. When I start out in any other way, it becomes an uphill battle — a long prose of apologetic justification leading up to the conclusion…only to find that once I reach the conclusion, I’ve lost my courage to say those words of disagreement.

By saying the most difficult sentence as the lead-off opener in a succinct way, I find that the rest of my articulation of why I disagree becomes an explanation rather than a justification.

Stating authentically what I’m skeptical of is something I’ve been increasingly trying to do during the first conversations with entrepreneurs. Weak founders get defensive, but for strong founders, it leads to more enriching conversations.

3. Join a “study group” that feeds you disparate sources information.

Every May, I find myself in a room with the richest people I know during our annual investor summit. Here’s what I observed:

At the highest level, the top players are forming what are essentially informal study groups to learn from each other. They have different names for it — board of directors, dinner parties, catch-up over coffee, but they are essentially study groups to get the pack smarter against the crowd.

But my hypothesis is that best players belong to numerous “study groups”. Like a Venn Diagram with many overlapping circles, you’ll have different and at times conflicting information, which empowers you to disagree.

Trying to practice what I preach, I’ve been putting together my own “study group” where I can share every week information in an e-mail thread what I’m seeing from different CEOs. If you’d like, you can join for this week’s discussion:

Once we stop automatically nodding to people’s ideas as the default setting, our agreeing start to mean something.

Through thoughtful scarcity of our affirmation of others’ ideas, others come to recognize that our agreeing with their ideas implies we listened critically to what they were saying. And once we do agree, we are signaling sincere agreement.

More importantly, we ourselves come to see our own agreement as an affirmation of our own conviction. We become more sure in our decision-making.

If you consider yourself a decision-maker and most certainly if you’re a founder of a startup, your role in the company means you carry not the privilege but the obligation to disagree.

It’s the only way to deliver on the best version of the only product you’ve promised to deliver.

I mean, you’d agree, right?

Honest Observations from a Venture Capitalist

Come talk with me on @JoeyJinKim where I converse with techies, founders, investors, and everyone in between.

Every year, I go to London in May and find myself in a room with the richest people I’ve met. It’s Romulus Capital’s Annual Summit where we invite our investors (aka Limited Partners or LPs) and showcase some of our top startup investments and their CEOs.

I sit in the room, wondering how much wealth is represented here.

There are money managers from Europe, families of business tycoons from Asia, and literal royal families from the Middle East, whose assets under management and net worth total somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

I sit in the room, trying to not to think too much about that.

This year, the room is at Claridge’s, 5-star luxury hotel in Mayfair, London. The day includes a boozy networking event, one-on-one interviews, and a Michelin-star-studded dinner.

When I think too much about it, I start to question if I belong in that room.

My family immigrated from Korea when I was 8. My family of four moved out of our 1-bed 1-bath basement to come to America. We had 4 suitcases and $2,000 to our name. I didn’t go to a fancy private school. I grew up in a Midwest town, knowing not much of the bigger world outside of it.

Yeah, now that I think about it, I actually don’t belong in that room.

But here’s the glorious thing about being an immigrant: I’ve never belonged in any room that I’ve walked into. And being an immigrant, you learn how to observe the room — you learn to quickly understand what it is about the commonalities and behaviors of the people in the room that give them the right to stay in it.

Here’s what I observed. All throughout the day, people in that room were constantly engaging in one thing: exchanging information.

They were asking tough questions, respectfully but unyieldingly. They were putting forth bold hypotheses about the world and inviting challenge to the hypotheses. They were admitting questions they were struggling with and asking for shortcuts to the answer.

They were actively and deliberately and constantly learning from each other.

At one point, two of our entrepreneurs were chatting until Jason, the CEO at Aila, pointed to Willie, the CEO at EquipmentShare and exclaimed, “Guys, I think Willie just solved my recruiting problems!”

Even at the highest level — no, especially at the highest level — everyone is still figuring this out as we go. No one’s lived more than once before. This is our first go for all of us. Even for serial entrepreneurs and investors, the market is dynamic, the competition responsive, the customers increasingly more demanding.

But more importantly, here’s the pattern that I’ve observed of my Harvard classmates to the Fortune 500 CEOs I worked for during my time at McKinsey:

At the highest level, the top players are forming what are essentially informal study groups to learn from each other. They have different names for it — board of directors, dinner parties, catch-up over coffee, but they are essentially study groups to get the pack smarter against the crowd.

So this year, I’m trying something at the annual summit.

I wanted to create a study group of sorts.

Over the past year, the more I coached entrepreneurs in the venture capital game, the more lessons I realized I needed to learn — lessons that are fundamental to being a good entrepreneur.

At our summit, I interviewed each of our portfolio startups and their CEOs on the fundamental questions that they’ve learned along the way. Over the next several weeks, I’ll edit their responses into short videos answering questions like:

• How do you know when you have a good business idea?
• What do I need to do to be a great startup CEO?
• What’s the most difficult part of being a CEO?
• How did you acquire your first 10 customers?
• What are some lessons you’ve learned about hiring?
• How do you compete against big giants?
• What is your advice for an early-stage founder?

You should join this study group by signing in below! Next week, I’ll send you what their responses were in the video, and I’d love for you to share with me what you’ve learned or experienced as a founder, an investor, or just as someone who’s generally interested in tech.

And hopefully, we can learn together to finally figure out for ourselves if we belong in the room.

First Introduction Conversation with Venture Capital

Come talk with me on @JoeyJinKim where I converse with techies, founders, investors, and everyone in between.

This is the cut-the-BS, transparent blog series on the criteria that I use as an investor when evaluating a startup as a potential investment. This post will focus on the first conversation startups have with VCs and what’s actually going through the VC’s mind. If you’re curious about how a VC decides to initiate the first conversation, you can start with Part 1.

What the First Conversation is Really About

They say fundraising is like dating, and the intro conversation is like the low-pressure first date. It lasts between 20–40 minutes, in person or by phone. You get a chance to introduce yourself, your company, etc…at least that’s what it looks like for the founder.

But unlike dating, for the VC, this is about getting to a quick no.

VCs aim to triage the bottom 80% of startups so that they can dig deeper into the top 20%. After the first conversation, I’m looking to say “no” to 70–80% of the startups, which implies that I’m actively looking for reasons to not invest in the startup.

Who You’re Talking to & How They’re Motivated

To understand why the triaging happens, it’s helpful to understand the person you’re talking to. The first chat is likely going to be with an analyst or an associate. They range from fresh-out-of-college to post-MBAs with a short stint as a founder, product manager, or a consultant/banker. They don’t have the check-writing powers, but they serve as the gatekeepers to the partners who do — an important dynamic to keep in mind.

Partners are stretched thin, serving on boards of startups they’re trying to keep alive, managing their investors, while also trying to keep up with other VCs. So they rely on associates to help them direct their attention to the right deals and divert it away from the wrong ones.

For an associate, their value to the firm is tied to finding and vetting deals. Their credibility lives and dies by the quality and quantity of the deals they bring to the firm. That means at this stage in the process, you are one of many potential startups that they need to triage in their pipeline.

But here’s the paradoxical secret: as much as the associates are looking to say “no”, they are also sincerely rooting for you to be the badass startup that they’ve been looking for. Associates want to be your first advocates at the VC firm. They want be the ones saying to the partners, “Hey, I just met this really cool startup, and you need to get on the phone with them tomorrow.”

In my experience, I’ve found the best entrepreneurs have figured out how to work with the associates to build their case during that first conversation.

The Agenda of the Conversation

To work with the VC, it’ll be helpful to hone in on what they’re looking for vs. not. I’ll share the agenda that I personally use 90% of the time. The following is a comprehensive list of topics from which I’ll pick and choose the important ones that are especially pertinent to the startup. The first conversation is about information: be concise, be precise, be measurable.

I want to take a quick moment to emphasize “team”. For startups, companies pivot, strategies change, revenues build, but the founders are rarely replaceable, especially in Seed and Series A. The evaluation on “team” goes beyond the resume. It’s more about you as a founder: how thoughtful you are in your answers, how collaborative you are in your approach to the conversation, how much conviction you have in your thesis.

Conclusion

Of course, not all VCs think alike. Some emphasize the human element while others the more quantitative proofpoints. Every pitch and firm require different prescriptive tips, but these are my personal agenda items that tend to hold true for most VCs you’ll meet in the VC world.

So, be concise, precise, and quantitative. Avoid the fluff or grandiose statements. If you’re truly ready to be funded, you’ll have a lot of substance you’ll need to convey. And the more substance you pack in and less fluff you keep out, higher your chances you might find yourself on second dates with the VC.

Keep on hustling, and see you at the top.

Come talk with me on @JoeyJinKim where I converse with techies, founders, investors, and everyone in between.

Raising from a VC can be a repetitive, ego-crushing, and worst of all, opaque process. So here’s the cut-the-BS, transparent blog series on the criteria that I use as an investor when evaluating a potential investment, and founders can hopefully use this as a resource to navigate when, where, and which investor to focus on throughout their fundraising process.

This post will focus on the initial “top-of-the-funnel” stage when evaluating a Seed or Series A startup.

It helps to get in the mindset of a VC. We get paid to say “no” — our job is to find the top 0.1% of the startups since we know that startups get outpaced, outnumbered, and outfunded by both new entrants and incumbents players. We need to triage the bottom 80% of the startups quickly so we have the time to dig deeper into the top 20% of the startups more thoroughly.

1) First triage: The fund’s thesis

Most VCs have a specific strategy or thesis. For example, Romulus Capital invests in B2B enterprise in big sleepy industries (e.g. healthcare, construction, logistics, O&G) or commercialization of science (e.g. “deep tech,” Ph.D founder) in Americas and Europe. Very rarely will we make an exception. By specializing, we can apply our learnings from one company to the next while building our differentiation as investors.

These theses aren’t secrets; they’re pasted all over the VCs’ websites. As founders, spending the initial 2–3 minutes to familiarize yourself with the “mandate” will save you the 20–30 minute dead-end conversation with the VC, who won’t have the thesis to invest in your type of company, no matter how much they like you (or your idea).

2) Second triage: Heuristics around your startup’s value proposition

Great, if you’re within our thesis, I’ll pull up your website to try to figure out what problem your product tries to solve. There are snap judgements that are being made in this phase. VCs will literally see dozens of pitches, websites, startups every day — and each pitch serves as a data point in a dataset of their understanding of the startup universe. More often than not, during this first stage, VCs will apply heuristics to pare down the candidate field:

• If you are solving a pain point that the VC doesn’t believe in, they will pass.
• If you are too similar to a company they recently passed on, they will pass.
• If you are one of the many undifferentiated players within a crowded space, they will pass.
• If you don’t fit into their thesis about the world, they will pass.

Of course, the positive versions of these heuristics will give you a boost in securing that first meeting with the VC. For example, if you happen to be solving a pain point the VC truly believes in, they will make sure to spend that extra time to dig in.

3) Third triage: LinkedIn, Your Online Resume

One thing that VCs look for is a high-quality team. To do this efficiently, I utilize LinkedIn, where I can quickly pull up 2–3 of your team’s founding members/C-suite. Then I begin piecing together your story. What, where, and how long did you study? Where did you work? How did you progress? How did you meet your founders?

All of this leads to answering one question: How compelling is your reason for solving the problem that you’re trying to solve?

For example, when I look at B2B enterprise, I’m oftentimes looking for a team who has risen through the ranks of the industry combined with a technologist who is bringing highly differentiated tech. I will never know until I chat with the team, but my guess is that the industry veteran is able to identify a real pain point for which the tech vet is able to engineer a solution.

On a smaller side note, pedigree holds weight (ie. school, brand company name, previously successful startup). During this early process, when I need to get through a lot startups, it serves as an imperfect heuristic that can typically serve as flags of interest.

Finally, if I’m on the fence, I triangulate on the quality of the team by seeing the quality of talent the founders attracted for their “first hires” (i.e. VP of Sales, Head of Engineering). Top players gravitate towards top players. If an exec from a high-paying job at a well-established firm was willing to leave his/her job and put it all on the line for you as a founder, that speaks volumes about your caliber as an entrepreneur and the belief in your mission.

Conclusion

A frustrating takeaway for new entrepreneurs is that it’s hard to prescribe actionable steps to increase your odds at the “top-of-the-funnel” stage. All of this triaging will happen before we chat. It’s likely unfair that so much has already been analyzed before you’ve had a fair chance to present yourself, especially since founders pour their souls and savings into their startups.

In defense, I think the best way to frame the situation is that the triaging will save both the entrepreneur and the investor a lot of time and soul — neither of which are in infinite supply for founders. For entrepreneurs, they should concentrate their limited resources on investors with realistic chance of funding them.

One last personal note: always always fight the good fight. Being a founder requires infinitely more courage than being a VC. I sincerely believe that being a founder is one of the bravest choices that anyone can make, regardless of what some random VC thinks of you.

Keep on hustling, and see you at the top.

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UPDATE: Btw…here’s part two of the series on what you do once you get the first meeting.